Joanna Lech

Joanna Lech (born 1984, Rzeszów, Poland) is a poet, writer, author of the book Sztuczki (2016, Nisza) and Kokon (2019, WAB / GW Foksal) and the poetry collections Zapaść (2009, SPP), Nawroty (2010, WBPiCAK), Trans (2016, Instytut Mikołowski) and Piosenki pikinierów (2017, Form). In May she arrives to Prague for her two-month residency with Prague UNESCO City of Literature to work on her new novel.

Her debut novel Sztuczki was nominated for the Nike Literary Prize and the Gdynia Prize 2017. In 2007 she was awarded the Grand Prix at the 6th Annual Prize of R. M. Rilke in Sopot, and in the 13th Jacek Bierezin Prize in Łodz the main prize. She was nominated for the Wrocław Poetry Prize Silesius (2010) and the Nike Literary Award (2011). Awarded Krakow scholarship and Grazella Foundation. Her work is translated into English, German, Ukrainian, Russian and Czech. She lives in Krakow, likes traveling, photographing and reading.

She composed the bestseller poetry anthology Znowu pragnę ciemnej miłości (2018, W.A.B.), where she chose the poems of the several outstanding Polish poets.

The poet and literary critic Bronisław Maj wrote about the Joanna´s own poetry: „Poems of Joanna Lech lead us – like Billie Holiday – "on the dark side of the street“… Without a pathos, but also without easy hope, calmly but with enormous concentration in the poetic images."

This year, a new novel Kokon released. Iga, a heroine of the novel Kokon, is terrible: selfish, ruthless without realizing the consequences of her behavior. But she is also brutally honest, and even childishly egoistic in relation to human pain. When the stable relationship with the older partner does not help, Iga decides for an extreme step.

Joanna Lech graduated in the creative writing at the Literary and Artistic Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

Nowadays, Joanna Lech writes her new book, whose story is set in the Prague environment and has already several chapters. She herself says about it: “My main objective during the scholarship in Prague is to work on the newest prose book titled „Pętle (The Loops)“. It will be a story about a murder case, thriller, but not a detective investigation story. Story will be shown from the other point of view: the reader looks at the investigation through the eyes of a random person. Alice, the main character of my third novel, is an ambitions student of art. Just moved to Praha for an art residency and she's trying to make her life. Accidentally finds an abandoned shopping bag and realizes that there is… a human hand in it. Later she discovers that it is the hand of a corpse from a murder case from the news. What would everyone do in her place? What will Alice do about it? And also, there is a murderer lurking somewhere…”

Take the opportunity and meet Joanna Lech personally during her residency Prague City of Literature at the performance on 16th June or during May and June 2019.

In May 2019, she was a guest of Book World Prague 2019, an International Book Fair and Literary Festival.

Video from author reading

Author reading at Book Fair